


In the Depths of the Moonlit Sea

by JanuaryGrey (Jan3693)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU - Remus is a merman instead of a werewolf, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Marauders Friendship (Harry Potter), MerMay, a goodly amount of angst, merman Remus, mostly happy ending, well mostly it's sort of complicated, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:14:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24307255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jan3693/pseuds/JanuaryGrey
Summary: Some babies are born with thin, downy hair across their bodies, but Hope and Lyall’s son has patches of small, silvery scales over his arms and legs.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 11
Kudos: 68





	In the Depths of the Moonlit Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to everyone over at the Writers' Defence Squad who when I said "tell me not to write the merman AU" replied "DO IT!!!"

When asked, Lyall Lupin tells everyone that his lovely, mysterious new wife is a muggle. That explains why none of his coworkers or friends or family have ever met or heard of her before. In their cottage perched along the rocky Welsh coastline, Lyall and Hope laugh at this little lie of theirs. 

*

Hope gives birth in a tide pool. Lyall worries about that, about the waves and the wind and the cold March sea. Neither of them really knows what they’re doing. No one makes books about pregnancies or babies like theirs, so they have to make it up as they go along, trust their instincts, and hope for the best. 

When he plucks his son out of the water, Lyall is glad they didn’t go to a midwife or a hospital. Some babies are born with thin, downy hair across their bodies, but Hope and Lyall’s son has patches of small, silvery scales over his arms and legs. 

* 

They name the baby Remus John Lupin. Rather, Hope lets Lyall name the baby after dead members of his family. She gives her son another name; one no human could hope to properly pronounce. It’s a secret name, one that rasps and grates when spoken in the air, but which sounds like song when said underwater.

*

The scales don’t last. Within a few weeks they’re gone. 

Lyall doesn’t say it out loud, but he’s relieved. He was worried his son would never be able fit in with other wizards if they could see the marks of his mixed heritage so easily. 

Hope doesn’t say it out loud either, but she’s sad when the last of Remus’s scales vanish. She worries that there’s none of her in her own son, that she’ll never be able to show him the world she came from, the world that’s half of his heritage. 

Her fears prove to be just as unfounded as her husband’s. 

Remus is three-and-a-half months old when Lyall drops his squirming, wailing son while giving him a bath in the kitchen sink. There’s a splash and Remus’s head slips beneath the water. His screams stop instantly. Lyall panics, but when he pulls the baby out of the water, Remus is laughing. It’s his first laugh. 

The gills at the sides of his neck flutter with his giggles.

*

_“Soulless, evil, deserving nothing but death.”  
_  
Lyall hates the words the moment they’re out of his mouth. He chastises himself, wondering how many people would think the same thing about his wife and son.

He blames it on the stress, on this new job that has taken him away from his work with Non-Human Spirituous Apparitions and plunked him in the middle of questioning committees for werewolves and vampires. He blames it on his lazy, underqualified colleagues who want to get home for the weekend so badly that they’re overlooking all the telltale signs that the man standing in front of them is a werewolf, and that he’s likely responsible for the deaths of two muggle children.

Lyall has always had a temper. Today, it gets him tossed out of the interrogation chamber and told to come back on Monday with a little more self-control. Chastened and upset by his own angry, thoughtless words, Lyall obeys. 

He doesn’t see the look Fenrir Greyback gives him as he leaves.

*

Hope and Lyall wake to the sound of their four-year-old son screaming.

When they rush into his room, they find a wolf of monstrous size, its jaws sunk into Remus’s thin arm.

Lyall tosses the werewolf away from his son with a curse. Thinking his job is done here, Fenrir Greyback attempts to flee.

He never makes it back out the window. 

In the last few seconds of his wretched life, Greyback is shocked to see that Hope Lupin has more teeth than he does. Three rows of them, in fact, and every single one of them is sharp.

*

Remus is bleeding, dying.

Hope gathers him into her arms and rushes down the rocky path to the beach, never feeling the stones that tear at her human-shaped feet. 

Behind her, her husband calls for her to wait, that they need a healer.

Remus doesn’t need a healer though. Not a wizarding one anyway.

She runs straight into the sea. The water is black, the full moon hidden behind thick clouds. Hope can’t see her son’s red blood, but she can taste is as she dives down.

* 

Lyall spends two weeks sitting on the beach. Most nights he sleeps there, if he sleeps at all.

He wonders if his son is alive, if his wife is ever coming back. Whether Remus is alive or dead, Lyall wouldn’t blame Hope if she stays beneath the waves forever.

*

When Hope does return, it’s with Remus in her arms.

There are scars across his left bicep and shoulder, and a deep green tail where his thin little legs should be, but he’s alive and that’s all that matters.

Lyall rushes into the ocean to meet them. The salt of his tears is lost in the spray of waves as he wraps his little family in his arms.

Hope is angry and scared. She’s going to feel that way for a long time, but she loves her husband and she knows this isn’t his really his fault. They’re in this together, the three of them.

*

Wizard-merfolk hybrids are a rare thing, barely documented or heard of outside rumor and bawdy sea shanties. A wizard-merfolk child bitten by a werewolf is, as far as Hope and Lyall can tell, completely unprecedented. 

They don’t know what will happen to Remus during the next full moon. No one does. However, Lyall thinks he knows someone who may be able to make an educated guess.

*

The history between merfolk and wizardkind was long and fraught. In the early days of their courtship and marriage, Hope sometimes joked that if she’d known Lyall was a wizard when they’d met, she probably would have drowned him on principle. 

Hope’s people build their villages far from shore, concealing them with magic wizards still can’t conceive of non-humans wielding. Their isolation allows them to avoid most of the conflicts and condescension their shore- and lake-dwelling brethren experience, but they still hear tales, and they build their own prejudices and grudges.

However, even in the town where Hope was raised, they know the name Newt Scamander. Moreover, they respect that name, trust it even.

Lyall has known Newt Scamander for years. Their work often overlapped, and they shared many amiable yet spirited debates on the finer aspects of magical creature classifications, usually over drinks at the Leaky Cauldron. 

If there’s one man whose compassion and discretion Lyall believes he can count on now, it’s Newt Scamander.

When told who is coming to visit them, Remus smiles for the first time since the full moon. His father has been reading him entries from _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_ as bedtime stories since Remus was two. Now he’s going to meet his hero. 

Maybe he can even get an autograph.

*

While Remus plays quietly with a bowtruckle that tagged along in Newt’s pocket, the magizoologist listens to Hope and Lyall describe the nightmare that happened to their son. When they’ve finished, Newt sits back in his chair, frowning as he thinks over a long career and all the knowledge he’s gained in that time. 

Despite it all, this is still a new one.

“I doubt he’ll actually turn into a werewolf,” Newt concludes. “He has enough non-human heritage that it should prevent the curse from taking hold.”

“However,” he cautions before Lyall and Hope can breathe a sigh of relief, “there may be some other side effects. Mind you, this is just a suspicion, but I would keep young Remus close to the water during the next full moon.”

*

They do as suggested. As the sun sinks toward the horizon, the Lupin family makes their way down to the rocky, secluded beach. 

Over the last few weeks, Hope and Lyall have noticed Remus now prefers both his fish and his beef on the raw side, and he’s become increasingly fussy and restlessness as the moon waxes.

Tonight, that moon will be full. 

His parents try to turn their evening outing into something fun, an adventure, but Remus knows something’s wrong. 

He can smell it in their sweat and feel it in his bones.

The sun sets and the beach is dark.

Lyall stays on the shore, wand in hand.

Hope accompanies her son into the water, standing barefoot with him in the surf and holding his little hand.

When the moon rises, Remus screams and changes.

He doesn’t transform into a wolf, but his gills open and his legs twist and fuse together into a finned tail. It’s a normal- _looking_ transformation for any merperson, but there’s nothing normal about this.

It’s not supposed to hurt. 

It’s supposed to take a moment rather than long, agonizing minutes, and Remus isn’t supposed to _feel_ his gills tearing open the skin of his neck, his organs shifting and changing, his teeth sharpening, and his scales growing.

His mother holds him through it all, and his father comes running to join them. All of them cry.

When it’s over, Remus can’t breathe above the water. He’s terrified and suffocating, clinging to his mother as she carries him far enough into the sea for them dive beneath their surface. Lyall can only watch helplessly as they go.

Hope changes her own shape as she always has, as any of her kind can: effortlessly and instantly. In her arms, Remus begins to breath normally, though he’s still shuddering with pain. Under the water his sobs are musical, but they still tear at his mother’s heart.

Hope is both horrified and relieved. She’s thankful her son will not suffer the full weight of lycanthropy. However, she’s appalled that the curse has affected him like this. It has turned what should be a beautiful, natural part of who Remus is into something painful and traumatizing.

In the depths of the moonlit sea, Hope Lupin cradles her son, singing him the lullabies from her own childhood, the ones she can’t sing above water. 

*

As the years roll by, Hope’s fears become reality. 

Outside of the full moon, Remus can change his shape as he pleases, but with every forced transformation, he does so less and less. 

Every full moon is painful, the change excruciating on both ends, usually leaving Remus exhausted and aching for days afterward.

Slowly, Remus begins to avoid the beaches. He cringes away from the water and refuses to join his mother on her long morning dives. His young mind associates the sea and his own merfolk form with his monthly pain and distress, and he grows to despise them both.

Remus knows his fear and rejection of the sea hurts his mother. He’s not the son she wanted, and he wishes he could change that. For her, he wishes he could dive headlong into the surf and follow her down to the palaces of coral and pearl from her stories. 

He can’t though, even if he tries, and he does try. Logically, Remus knows that if he transforms outside of the full moon it won’t hurt, but the logical part of his mind can’t convince the rest of him of this truth. Every time he steps foot in the water he shutters and balks, every nerve primed to expect agony, every instinct screaming to get back on land.

The sea is a part of him. It always will be.

Remus hates it.

*

Slowly, yet all too quickly for his parents’ comfort, Remus grows up. 

He’s ten-years-old now, and has become a quiet, thoughtful boy. He likes books and animals of both the mundane and magical varieties, and even though he’s shy around strangers, deep down inside, Remus longs for the sorts of friendships he finds in books. He loves his parents and their cottage and their quiet lives, but at the same time he wants so much more.

Remus can never quite put a finger on what this _more_ is; not until he pulls a book off the shelf in his father’s study and spends all day read _Hogwarts: A History_ while sprawled in the sandy crabgrass behind the cottage. 

Over dinner, he asks his father if he can go to Hogwarts. Hope and Lyall exchange a melancholy glance.

Remus’s education was a matter of some debate between his parents even before Greyback’s attack. Lyall had wanted his son to attend Hogwarts just as he had. Hope had wanted to homeschool him, allowing Lyall to teach him wizards’ magic while she taught him merfolk magic: things Remus could never learn in any school of witchcraft and wizardry. It was an argument they never fully settled before it became irrelevant.

Lyall takes the lead and tries to let his son down as gently as possible. 

Even before Greyback’s attack, attending Hogwarts would have been a challenge for Remus. He would have had to hide his merfolk side from everyone—teachers, classmates, roommates, and friends alike. Such things were often frowned upon in wizarding society, especially these days with more and more news of hatred and even violence against witches and wizards not of “pure blood.” There are even whispers of a Dark Lord gathering followers.

Remus was always going to have to hide half of himself to be safe and accepted by the wizarding world. Now that he can’t always control his transformations, it’s likely he’ll never be entirely safe or accepted in the wizarding world

A selfish part of Hope wishes this rejection might turn Remus’s interest back toward her side of magic, but she knows in her heart that Remus will never be accepted among her people either. He never would have been, not entirely. Not when he bears human blood, and especially not now that he carries a curse from the surface world.

Everyone in the Lupin household has their heart broken that night.

*

Over the years, Lyall has kept in touch with Newt Scamander. He gives the magizoologist updates on Remus and asks for advice or guidance. Newt is rarely able to offer him much beyond friendly support, but often that means the world.

When Lyall tells Newt about dashing Remus’s hopes of going to Hogwarts, Newt gives him gentle reassurance. However, in the back of his mind the magizoologist is mulling over an idea.

It takes a few months and plenty of advice from his wife for Newt’s idea to evolve into a plan. By then, it’s almost Remus Lupin’s eleventh birthday. If it works, Newt hopes his plan will be fitting birthday gift for the boy.

*

The friendship between Albus Dumbledore and Newt Scamander is long and complicated. There’s a good deal of respect on both sides though, and Dumbledore listens as Newt describes the condition of a “hypothetical” child who may need some unusual accommodations to attend Hogwarts next fall.

*

“There is a secret passageway on the fourth floor of the castle near a storage room,” Albus Dumbledore explains as he wipes a bit of foul-smelling liquid out of his beard. “It has been coaxed into leading directly down to the boathouse. Aside the arrival of the first years at the start of each school year, that area is off-limits to students and has direct access into the lake”

Sitting across from Dumbledore on the floor of the Lupins’ sitting room, Remus is biting his lip to keep from smiling. He tries to pretend it’s because he just scored a point in gobstones against the most powerful wizard of the century, but really, he’s trying not to let his hope show too much. He can see the worried expressions on his parents’ faces. They might still say no. 

“What about the lake?” Hope asks. “Lyall says there are already merfolk living there. They may not take kindly to an interloper, especially given Remus’s…condition.”

Remus feels a twist in his guts at this reminder that even if he’s allowed to go to Hogwarts it won’t cure him. He’ll still have to transform every full moon, only now he’ll have to do it in a strange place far away from his parents. 

“I have spoken with their chieftain about the matter,” Dumbledore says with a calm, reassuring smile. “She says that while they are not currently open to welcoming Remus into their village during his transformations, they do not mind sharing the lake during full moons, or whenever else Remus wishes to take a swim.”

The twists in Remus’s guts turn into knots. _Never_ , Remus thinks to himself. He’ll never set foot nor fin into that lake except when he absolutely has to. He doesn’t say that though. He doesn’t say anything. He watches his parents. Their frowns are still there, still deep and anxious.

“What about other dangers?” Lyall asks. “There are grindylows down there, not to mention the giant squid.” 

“Grindylows are no danger to us, dear,” Hope tells her husband. Even if she’s dubious about this entire venture, she can’t help but set this particular point straight. “I grew up with two as pets.”

Remus does his best to hide his grimace lest the adults think he’s afraid. He’s seen pictures of grindylows in Mr. Scamander’s book though, and he _does not_ want one as a pet.

“So I was informed,” Dumbledore says with a nod and a smile for Hope. “As for the squid, she would never harm any student.”

Lyall is still frowning. He turns to Hope, who bows her head. Lyall nods and kisses her hair, lips press to the brown curls that turn dark seaweed green beneath the sea. Their unspoken conversation concluded, Lyall looks down at his son and sighs heavily.

“It’s up to you, Remus,” he says. “It’s your education, your life, so it should be your choice.”

*

On the first of September, Remus Lupin arrives at King’s Cross Station in London at 10:30 in the morning. That leaves him plenty of time to get settled on the train, but hopefully not enough time to panic.

Lyall and Hope are there with him. A part of each of them, Remus included, is regretting this decision. However, at the same time, Hope and Lyall are also very, very proud. This son of theirs is brave and smart and kind and resourceful. He’ll be all right. 

They tell themselves this, over and over again, as they help Remus load his trunk, as they kiss him goodbye, as they watch him walk away from them onto the Hogwarts Express.

*

In the middle of London, amidst the noise of the crowded platform and the smells of the train and the people, Remus realizes something is missing. It takes him a moment to realize it’s the ocean. He’s never been this far from it before, and he can feel the absence of sand and salt and water. It’s a hollow deeper than blood and bone. It feels wrong, but it’s also a relief.

He breathes out a sigh and smiles as he boards the train.

*

Remus can feel the lake the second he steps off the train. 

It’s very different from the sea, smaller and stiller, but beneath its smooth surface it teems with life and magic. The magic is different from that of the sea as well, but it still tugs at Remus, calling to him, tempting him, alluring and grotesque at the same time.

He wants to stay as far away from it as he can, but all the first years are herded down to the water’s edge and told to climb into little boats. 

The water is black beneath the boat, ripples cutting the light of the waning half-moon into ribbons. Remus can feel it singing in his bones, a strange new song played to a familiar tune. He glares down at the lake and the moonlight until the girl sitting next to him gasps.

Finally looking up, Remus sees it for the first time.

Suddenly, there’s a new song singing within Remus’s soul.

He’s here, he’s finally here at Hogwarts.


End file.
